, has died. She was 56.“I never sold my soul,” Patitz said in a 2020 interview. Born in Hamburg to an Estonian mother and German father, she moved with her family to Skanör, an idyllic seaside town in the south of Sweden when she was quite young.
In 1983, as a 17-year-old tomboy and competitive horse rider, she entered an Elite Model Contest in Stockholm. She placed third in Sweden.
The prize was a trip to Paris and a limited-time contract. But as Vogue wrote in 1988, “a star was not quickly born. Tatjana found no work for a year.”Tatjana Patitz walks for Christian Dior in 1991.Enter , the fairy godfather of Patitz’s career.
The German photographer, noted for his unretouched images and preference for a “natural” beauty look, would shoot Patitz for the famous image “White Shirts: Six Supermodels, Malibu,” in 1988, and again for British Vogue’s January 1990 cover.
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